Witness
by La Editor
Summary: It wouldn't pay to want more than she ought to have, anyway. She learned that in the fire.


The bargeman's daughter finds the Prince first.

She had been picking through the fields with the other women. They were the first to hike their skirts up and square their shoulders after the battle was over because there is still work to be done, and she goes because her father has his duties and she has hers. They pick through first for survivors, crowbills and fish pikes in hand just in case, but she finds no orcs. She sees no survivors either, and keeps walking past what's probably necessary to venture up the field to the ice, tracing the trail of bodies. Her eyes travel along them with a pale detachment - she will cry, later, with her younger sister in her arms and the burden of a field of dead eyes firmly nestled on her shoulders - but for now, the cold has wrapped around her insides and she focuses on breathing. Snow shivers down still, softly. It's a crisp air. Clean.

There is a figure at the base of the ice, and she hesitates for only a moment before approaching. The King's body was somewhere at the top, she knows, because Bilbo had them go to find him, and the elf-woman had carried the second prince back herself.

No one has come for this one yet.

She studies him. There's a fine layer of snow dusting him, over the terrible rip in his chest and the blood splattered over his tunic, snow along his braids and long hair splayed around his face like a halo. His face is frozen in surprise. He must have been taken from behind, then, and dropped; she glances up, almost afraid to look away in case he moves. It must have been such a long way down. It accounts for the strange way his legs are bent, the angles untenable to support life.

His eyes are still open.

After a moment, she carefully places her hatchet on the ground and sits down. She waits, then leans forward and with the lightest touch dusts the snow from his eyelashes, closes his already clouding eyes for him. He is sleeping, if it weren't for the deep stain on the ice underneath him. Satisfied, she draws back, flexing her fingers. His skin is so cold. It must have hardly been a few hours - a bizarre, grotesque thought as she looks at him now. He is dead.

"I'm Sigrid," she says, and the silent air greets her. "I'm not sure if you had remembered my name," she clarifies, "I remember yours because of how often you called for your brother, and I knew it rhymed."

Sigrid scoots a little closer to him, careful to avoid the red stain underneath his torso, resettling her skirts. His braids are all askew, and she idly wonders if he would hate to be found that way - dwarves must be very proud of their fashion, it all looks so intricate, so thought out. (She tries to imagine him before he died. She wonders if he knew, if he had accepted it or if he had fought it the whole way down. Was it slow? Quick, maybe, a snuffed candle and you are gone, goodbye?) One of his beads must have fallen from his beard when he impacted and lays just out of reach. She leans forward and gently plucks it from the ice, rolls the cold metal in her fingers. There is a small fleck of red on the etching that she rubs off with the pad of her thumb.

"You must be so cold," she says. It hangs in the empty air between them. She unwraps her red scarf and kneels, worrying at her lip for a moment before settling it across his shoulders. There, now. Snug as a bug in a rug, as Tilda would say. He really could be sleeping now.

"Oh," it comes out very quietly, and then again: " _oh._ " Her eyes have prickled and she knows there will be no stopping when they go, so she grinds the heels of her palms in to ebb the tide before it is too late, it is already too late because he is dead and it isn't that it's him, it's that it's _everything_ , but that is a horrible thing to put on the dead man you are sitting next to, so the bargeman's daughter gulps in and steadily breathes out. She's the first to find him and she can't help but think that means something - it does, doesn't it? She would want whoever would find her to care, if it were her laying there.

Her life means something, no matter how small it is. His life meant something.

"You had mentioned to me you were always chasing after your brother in one way or another. You thought he was going to die, didn't you, that night," she says. She doesn't follow up to remind him that his brother did die. And him too.

She breathes in, she breathes out.

"You're very handsome, Fili," she observes, laying her cheek on her knees, gazing at him for a moment when she had been afraid to let her eyes linger before. She was afraid of being rude, at first, but feels they have a rapport now. "I'll bet you had a dwarf lady back home. Wherever that would be." She hums and picks at a stray thread on her skirt; she is much colder without her scarf, but she already gave it to him and she stupidly can't help but think he needs it more than she does. "I don't. I don't have a home, to start with. I know you were sorry about it, though, I'm not saying to rub it in. Just that I didn't have a lady. I like lads," she adds for his edification, in case he was wondering. "Just none of the ones from back home. They were all terrible and stupid, and none of them had blond braids and said _my lady_ to a girl they had just met and not that that means anything," she says - she says, she says, she is giving him garbled words, a token of her inability to present him with a proper lament. She wishes she had a pretty song up her sleeve for him, but Bain is always telling her that she sounds like a warbler bird. She'd boxed him in the ears for it, but believes him enough to not want to subject the dwarf prince to an ill-conceived solo.

She can see her own breath. There isn't any frosted air from his exhale, because he is dead.

The snow has stopped, for now, and the late sun holds steady in the sky, a thankful change from the past overcast few days. It's a golden glow, one that reminds Sigrid of not wintry days but the hot ones that made her strip her overdress off when she had been young enough to not worry about the indecency of things like stripping her overdress off. She and Bain and a very young Tilda would play in the creek off the mainland, the few times every summer they would venture down, forever-days in the treasure box of her memory. She can still recall the green smell, something alive - foreign but not unpleasant. Maybe something drifting in from the forest, where the elves lived.

"I hope," she starts, but falters. Hope seems so useless. Words seem so useless. She licks her chapped lips and swallows the dryness in her throat down to try again. "I hope you found your brother. I hope you're together now. I know I wouldn't want to be alone after all that. I think you're very brave," she tells him and has to look away now or she'll start up with the crying, and Sigrid is afraid that if she starts she will not _stop_. She's always been the one to say _no use_ and clean up the spilt milk but it just feels like it's _all_ spilt milk, and isn't that stupid? When she still has everything important, when it comes down to it, still has Da and Bain and Tilda all in one piece? But it hadn't really hit her until now, she's here and he's here and she's alive and he _isn't_ and it's a terrible admission that she is Not An Adult (because she is always Not-Mam but a damn good replica, she would rather kiss the Master's boots than see her Da fed that terrible jerky he always tries to get away with eating, Tilda's clothes unmended or buttoned wrong or Bain missing school no matter how many times he has climbed from the window and she has had to chase him back) - but she feels so small, very suddenly, and so feeble.

"I still have my family, but now I'm the one who has to reclaim my homeland," she tells him. And already knows that whenever she looks upon Dale she will see his face in this moment.

 _One dead prince at a time,_ Sigrid tells herself, and it's such a horrid thing to think that she buries her face in her hands and laughs. Now that she is furthest from all of it, everything feels starkly more real. Maybe it is because she secretly thought he was very dashing, for a dwarf, and she is sixteen and is allowed to think these things because she is young and can only stop being Not-Mam-But-Trying very rarely, and one of those times was when he had taken her hand in his own large fingers, and tipped his head down and said _thank you for helping my brother and me._ His mustache had brushed over her knuckles.

"You can keep the scarf," she tells him. He doesn't say thank you, but she imagines he finds it a very nice gesture. "I'm trading your bead for it so it's fair, and all. My siblings are all about fairness. I wonder if yours was." She fiddles with it, wondering how to go about fixing it into her fine hair; she finally pulls her falling pins out and the whole thing tumbles down. She winds it back up, but this time with the bead looped onto a braid, tucked into the others. "There," she says. "Fair."

She adjusts the pack of field supplies on her shoulder, knowing there is work to be done still. They are already speaking of making Da king and what that means for her, she can already hazard a guess for. She moves to stand, but looks back at him and fancies he should have a proper sending off, which he will, later - she'll go to his kin and they will come find him, and she is sure there will be plenty of adornments to add, they will clean and dress him and it will be a beautiful funeral fit for a prince. But she feels wrong to leave him without anything now, so she kisses her two fingers and places them very gently on his cheek.

"I don't have any grand things to give, but I bet you would feel smug knowing I've never given that to anyone before, and my Da has always said storybook princes would get into fist fights for a kiss on the cheek from my lips, which is why the Lake boys will never get the time of day from me," she tells him as she picks up her hatchet and feels a flood of - something - responsibility, perhaps, because she is her father's daughter and duty calls her back as she stands straight and looks towards her own mountain to reclaim.

"I wish you the best," Sigrid says, and leaves the Prince behind.


End file.
